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Personally for me, it got really bad years before GPT - because of SEO crap on Google. Trying to get accurate information on anything related to nutrition or health became, and still is, really hard.
Does anyone know a way to get a full dump of pre-2021 Wikipedia? Their dumps page only has current dumps. I know it’s not perfect (i.e. anyone can edit Wikipedia), but I think having it would be a good hedge in case things get really bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
I was able to quickly find some 2007/08 dumps, but it looks like there is a whole ecosystem of backups out there.
Take this quote from George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War
"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant."
I believe in objective truth, but finding it has always been very difficult.
Don't forget true factual information disappearing due to things like the GDPR Right to be Forgotten. It's not just about creation of misinfo, but also about censorship of true info.
I suggest these things printed on dead trees called "books" with publication dates in 2021 or earlier or from established publishers which don't print a Word doc emailed them by "T.T. Notchatgpt"
I'm pretty sure that an AI can write a book and put any date it wants on it. There are methods of disinformation that obviously long pre-date LLMs.
Don't forget true factual information disappearing due to things like the GDPR Right to be Forgotten. It's not just about creation of misinfo, but also about censorship of true info.
Any good examples? I agree with your premise
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI is on a completely differnt level than social media. With social media, you can still find information if you do some research. With AI, even supposetly reliable sources will be indistinguishable from fake ones. Scientific researchers are using AI indiscriminately, governments, etc. It will get to the point where when asked to show proof of something, you'll realize there is no way to actually find it.
I kinda agree. AI is indeed a reductive technology that very rarely (if ever) returns factual content. But that's tangential to the real problem, in my opinion; how much we trust people who are entirely capable of disseminating lies. Researchers and government employees know that they're doing the wrong thing when they delegate important work to language models. They are liable to be audited, questioned under-oath an…